THE Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday in favor of a bill requiring TikTok to cut ties with its parent, the Chinese company ByteDanceand more widely with the China in order not to risk being banned in the US.
THE Joe Biden immediately said he would sign the bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives on Saturday and stems from concerns that China could access or monitor the data of Americans who use TikTok.
“For years we have allowed the Chinese Communist Party to control one of the most popular apps in the US, and that has been dangerously short-sighted,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, the highest-ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee.
“The new legislation will require the Chinese owner (of TikTok) to sell the app. It’s a good move for America,” he said.
TikTok, which stresses that it has not shared and does not intend to share data of its American users with the Chinese government, complains that the bill amounts to a ban, which infringes on its users’ freedom of expression.
The company has not commented on the outcome of the Senate vote, but over the weekend announced to its workers that it would go to court to block the implementation of the legislation.
“We will continue to fight, as this bill clearly violates the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s 170 million American users (…) This is the beginning, not the end, of this long process,” the company told employees in a message of the email seen by Reuters.
THE Senate voted 79 to 18 in favor of the measure, which was included in the bill that provided $95 billion in aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan.
In 2020 the then president of the USA Donald Trump tried to block TikTok in the country, but was blocked by justice.
The new bill has a stronger legal footing, experts say, and gives the White House new tools to ban or force the sale of other foreign-owned apps it deems to threaten the country’s national security.
If enacted, the bill would force ByteDance to sell TikTok within 12 months. Otherwise the application will be blocked from the online stores of Apple Google in the US territory.
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